Arthur Chu stood on the set of Jeopardy! last November, and with $400 at stake in the category “After the White House,” he knew the question to the answer. The show’s host, Alex Trebek, teased that the name in question had, since 1982, been a distinguished professor at Emory University.

“Who is Carter?” Chu replied. The response was correct; Chu would select the next clue.

Here, a normal contestant would build on success and take “After the White House” for $600. But Chu did not. He darted to “Shakespearean Spelling Bee” for $1,000, the highest monetary value in the show’s first round. “Queen of the fairies, wife of Oberon,” Trebek read. “What is T-i-t-a-n-i-a?” asked Chu, well on the way to his fourth straight win. Chu, a 30-year-old insurance compliance analyst and voice-over artist from Ohio, went undefeated through nine matches televised in January and February, and his $261,000 earnings rank third all-time for Jeopardy!.

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As tiny a factor as it may seem, the jump from “After the White House” to “Shakespearean Spelling Bee” is what’s helped Chu claim his position in the scattered lineage of incendiary Jeopardy! contestants who approach Jeopardy! not as a knowledge contest to master so much as a rule set to overcome. His frenetic hop between categories is known by the niche community of Jeopardy! game theorists as the Forrest Bounce. It’s named for Chuck Forrest, the 1985 contestant who dashed from one topic to the next and left opponents little time to gather their thoughts. Chu’s move was also a nod to Roger Craig, the guy he calls his greatest Jeopardy! influence. Craig, a 2011 contestant, based his strategy on chasing Daily Doubles, which often sit toward the bottom of the game board.

Chu has worked this sort of Jeopardy! heresy to perfection, but not everyone has cheered him along. Chu has endured some backlash—some in jest, some offensive—because the tactics that have stymied his onstage opponents have also disrupted his armchair competition. Those who vilify Chu might not consciously connect the dots, but their vexation with him reflects a tacit understanding of Jeopardy! and its historical role in American life.

Jeopardy! will probably meet the TV reaper soon. Yes, 50 years after it first aired, and 30 years after the Trebek era launched, the show remains one of America’s most watched syndicated TV programs. But its viewership is among the oldest of any in the industry. As Jeopardy! fans near their demise, the show will die out for the same reason it lived so long: It was built to suppress, not support, disruption.

As tensions with the Soviets percolated, a phlegmatic quiz show could offer Americans an opportunity to bunker down in their homes and build intellectual assets for an ideological war.

The early 1960s should have been a good time to launch a game show. Color TVs had become common in middle-class homes, and TV consumption was still guiltless. Yet to be a quiz show in the mid-’60s was to linger under suspicion of a scandal. In 1956, the producers and contestants of Twenty-One were found to have fixed episodes to boost ratings through likable winners and compelling story lines, such as when two contestants finished tied in three straight episodes. The $64,000 Question and Dotto, other quiz shows of the era, were revealed to have deceived viewers with similar techniques. The scandals bred so much distrust that networks cancelled most quiz shows and Congress intervened in 1960 to make rigging quizzes illegal.

By 1964, when Jeopardy! debuted, the controversy surrounding quiz shows had waned but not fully passed. Merv Griffin, the creator and producer of Jeopardy!, needed his daytime show to be watchable, but more importantly, above reproach. Griffin’s show, then hosted by Art Fleming, survived through early 1975 and re-emerged for a season in 1978, but it never sustained the success of pre-scandal quiz shows.

The TV climate in 1984, when Jeopardy! relaunched, was different from what it had been two decades prior, in the program’s first iteration. Whereas ’60s TV stories were mostly episode-contained, ’80s TV placed greater reliance on macro-narratives and characters that drew viewers’ emotional devotion. Sitcoms such as Cosby, Cheers, and Family Ties fared well in 1984 Nielsen ratings, but TV that year was distinguished by dramatic stories of people who amassed wealth and maintained justice. Dynasty, Dallas, and Falcon Crest chronicled the lives of prosperous, powerful people. Magnum, P.I.; Murder, She Wrote; Night Court; and Miami Vice developed characters who enforced the law.

In this setting, a game show could differentiate itself from the rest of the evening TV slate, and Jeopardy! in particular was a fitting interlude to stories about people who got rich and laid down the law. Its unvarnished meritocracy embodied the capitalism narrative Americans seem to have wanted to believe at the time.

A few months before Jeopardy! resurrected, controversy threatened to undermine the game-show industry again. Michael Larson, an unemployed former ice-cream truck driver from Ohio, sat at home and studied game shows in search of exploitable tendencies. He found his target in Press Your Luck. Contestants on Press Your Luck hit a button to pause the selector light as it ricocheted among the game board’s 18 squares, each of which had a monetary value, prize, or a Whammy—an unwelcome square that drained a player of all prior earnings. Larson appeared on the show in June 1984, and his understanding of the selector light’s patterns allowed him to win $110,237—at its time, the greatest one-day total in game show history. Producers of Press Your Luck suspected Larson of cheating, but his tactics were legal: No law prevented anyone from sitting in a family room with a stack of TVs and all the time in the world.

Larson was not, however, another disgrace for game shows. He was arguably a disheveled version of the catapult-to-affluence narrative so popular in TV dramas of the era.

Americans in the mid-’80s had also more time to watch evening TV, as their siege mentality amid global unrest sent them to the comfort of the family room (both cable programming and TV news experienced spikes in viewership during this period). The Cold War preoccupied the nation, and the Reagan Doctrine set out to maintain U.S. preeminence over competing global superpowers. It seems likely, then, that as tensions with the Soviets continued to percolate, a phlegmatic quiz show could offer Americans an opportunity to bunker down in their homes and build intellectual assets for an ideological war. If there was a brains-race component to the Cold War, perhaps Jeopardy! would help Americans prevail.

Chu can’t break a show that's already broken. But Chu can shape the future of 'Jeopardy!,' even as its heyday fades into America’s past.

In choosing Trebek, a Canadian with an extensive résumé as a failed game-show emcee, as the host, Griffin made a prescient, if unlikely, choice. By the time he joined Jeopardy!, Trebek had moderated seven game shows in 15 years, including the likes of Music Hop and Battlestars. It’s possible that instability preceding the Jeopardy! job influenced Trebek to be more risk-averse, and if so, it only enhanced the show’s aura. With an inscrutable, polite persona and packaged asides, Trebek fit perfectly in a program without characters, storylines, or action, a show that starred the audience at home.

Stability became the signature of Jeopardy! and Trebek. It only fueled the “robot” lore that Trebek missed just one show in three decades, and that was for an April Fool’s prank when he swapped duties with Wheel of Fortune’s Pat Sajak. While the program’s set changed looks a few times, each transition was modest, and the austere rigidity of its box-heavy aesthetic survived. It should mean something that the most memorable, dynamic moments in Jeopardy! history occurred on another show and mocked its planar entertainment. The brilliance of Saturday Night Live’s longstanding Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch surfaced when parodies of Sean Connery, Burt Reynolds, and others prodded the impassive persona of Will Ferrell’s Trebek.

While the actual Trebek and his show didn’t change much over the years, the surrounding world, of course, did. The search engine supplanted TV as the medium through which Americans acquired trivial knowledge. The Internet enabled people to consume even lowbrow forms of entertainment in a cerebral fashion. They no longer needed entertainment that wasn’t meant to entertain. In politics, the Reagan Doctrine ran its course, and the sense of national and ideological supremacy later dissolved among younger Americans. There were new, better ways to sharpen American minds for a Cold War, and nobody was training for one, anyway.

So maybe the renegade minds who disrupted Jeopardy! over the years disregarded its role as a cognitive training tool in the race for global control. Perhaps they failed to see that—putting it in the bleakest terms—they were just warm bodies tossed on the set to make viewers feel competitive.

It doesn’t matter now. Chu can’t break a show that is already broken; in fact, his exploitation of the show’s rules might be the climactic reflection of the capitalistic milieu that gave Jeopardy! life. But Chu can shape the future of Jeopardy!, even as its heyday rapidly fades into America’s past. Though he compares himself to Craig and others parallel him with Forrest, maybe Chu is another Larson, able to restore interest in the game-show form. Other programs could someday benefit from his subversion—shows in which contestants are true characters, shows meant to entertain.

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”